Insanity

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“I know I’m alone. I got nothing. There’s no one to share my secrets,
dreams, and deepest thoughts with. I’m all alone, except for this knife
lying in the drawer next to my bed.”

I’m a fifteen, almost sixteen, year old girl from the Netherlands, and I’m
writing this because I’m currently in the mood to grab a razor and cut
myself. Instead of that, I guess I’ll contribute to this amazing website. I
hope somebody will find some kind of relief in reading this.

When you look at my life and the family I’m from, it seems quite a strange
thing I’m occasionally sliding this razor across my wrists. My parents are
together happily, somewhat, I’m not incredibly ugly and I wasn’t really
bullied. But there’s one thing, I think. When I was about six, seven years
old we used to have this babysitter. At that time he was about the same age
I’m now, fifteen, sixteen or so. And I’ll say without pointing out any
details that he sexually abused me during a period of about a year. When he
moved away to go to college, the abuse stopped.

No one ever found out. I kept it all to myself. Except for some people I know
just from the internet, there’s no one who knows the exact details about
what’s happened. And I’d like to keep it that way. I don’t think I will
enjoy sending him to court. I’d rather just let things pass by, while I try
to forget. And there’s a lot that I want to forget. There were nights in
which I were almost paralysed with fear, wishing that he wouldn’t come. It
seems like that all I could feel at that time, was fear. Returning
nightmares haunted me, and they still come back sometimes, even now. There
was also this feeling of emptiness. Feeling dead, emotionally.

The shame when I was old enough to understand what happened to me was even
worse. When there was a birthday of a member of his family coming up, I
would be sick. If I wasn’t, I was scared to dead, scared to see him, to meet
his eyes, and I was afraid that he had told anyone. I remember once being at
that house and being so totally struck by fear, that I threw up in their
toilet.

But when he left for good, almost, and went to study in an even more far
away town, I started to forget what had happened.

I can’t exactly remember when I actually started harming myself. As far as I
know, it has always been there, even on a very young age. I remember as a
little kid, I would spend hours just crying, and I would bash my head
against the wall, just to make the thoughts spinning around in my head stop.
At the age of fourteen, or so, I learnt about cutting from some article I
read in a magazine. Shortly after, I started cutting myself. I never cut
really deep, though. I sport a lot, and while wearing those outfits with
short sleeves it was hard to hide the cuts and scars. It didn’t take long
before my parents found out — and my mother had a really large deal in
preventing me from cutting myself. When I came at the point at which three
of my cuts needed stitches, my mom started searching my room for knifes
before I’d go to sleep, and most of the times I had nothing left to harm
myself with.

The previous school year was really bad. It felt like I snapped. All the
feelings I’ve always been hiding in my life, suddenly made their way to the
surface. Instead of smiling, I always seemed to be near crying. I hated
school, all the people on it, and I hate how they didn’t even seem to
notice, nor care, about any of my feelings. I ended up staying home “sick”
a lot. My grades were getting worse and worse. And because I was isolating
myself from every social contact in such a way, a lot of people simply
started ignoring me. People of which I thought who were my friends, moved
on to more “happy” and “social” people. The class counsellor (I’m not sure
what the word for it in English is) who was supposed to help people and
guide me, simply hated me. I remember him calling me “lazy and always trying
to make profit of others” on this phone call he made to my parents.

And I think that taught me a lot about life in general. I’ll quote a song
title from Eric Clapton: “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.” And
that’s true. No one really does care about me, I think. People move on.

Compared to last year, this year I’m a lot better. I switched schools. But I
still feel so dead, emotionally, and at some times the urge to hurt myself
is so great, that I pick up a needle and fill both of my arms with tiny
scratches. I never really cut myself deep anymore. I hide what I truly feel
from everybody I know, like I always used to. I even lied to this shrink I
used to visit. I don’t want to bring up what happened in the past. I want to
forget all. And I have to admit it works slightly better this way. It helps
a tiny little bit not feeling hated by everyone around you. But it’s not
like all my pain is suddenly taken away. Maybe I’ll hold on living like
this, and maybe I’ll collapse while I’m trying to survive. Who knows.

I don’t feel like I’ve got anything to remain alive for, at the moment. I
can’t understand why I was put on this world.